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Google Summer of Code Wrap up: Sigmah

Friday, January 16, 2015

Today’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) wrap-up comes from Olivier Sarrat at Sigmah, an open source project producing a web app to help humanitarian aid organizations manage their projects.

Sigmah is an initiative led by 12 NGOs to develop open source project management software for the international aid sector. It is a Java web application developed with GWT. This summer, three GSoC students from Brazil, India, and Romania implemented high-priority features which will soon be available in our Sigmah 2.0 release.

Renato Almeida worked on making Sigmah more flexible. In version 1.2, project model parameters couldn’t be changed if the model had already been used to create a project, but thanks to Renato’s work, this will soon be possible. For example, an organization could begin requiring its teams to attach the Terms of Reference to the initial assessment field visit, and this could be applied to all ongoing projects that have not yet completed the initial assessment phase. This allows organizations to react faster to feedback from team members and amend software parameters accordingly.

S.P. Mohanty, who has been working with Sigmah via GSoC since 2012, has improved Sigmah’s file transfer mechanism so that interrupted uploads can be resumed at a later time. This means it will no longer be necessary to wait and retry several times when sending a large file over an unreliable network connection. Mohanty’s work has also been re-used in the development of the offline mode.

Finally, Lucia Madalina Cojocaru’s work focused on a specific aspect of collecting indicators used to determine if a humanitarian project’s goals are being met: the management of data collection sites and project location. She also added the ability to use OpenStreetMap (OSM) in addition to the existing support for Google Maps. For humanitarian organizations, OSM collaborative maps can sometimes be more up-to-date and precise in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Lucia also established the technical foundations so that in the future it will be possible to export data in Humanitarian eXchange Language (HXL), a standard from the OCHA (UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) which aims to improve coordination within the sector.